Just a question: why would anyone to enable hibernation? It's a too slow process to be useful.

Not really, only takes seconds, in particular with an SSD. Depends on what you do with your machine but for me it's certainly faster than closing everything down, saving every document, and re-opening it all again next time you start the computer. It's been my default for years on both Linux and Windows machines.

neither of those solutions actually turns your computer off to the point where you can cut the power.

Exactly. Although I use suspend (sleep) by default on my D255E netbook, Hibernate is an essential function in the event of low or critical battery levels when one can't access a mains socket. Especially so with the Dell (server machine) in case of a power cut, as its battery is well past its use-by date.

Suspend / sleep still drains the battery, albeit rather slowly, meaning the Acer has to be plugged in when I get home in order to avoid unnecessary battery wear.

I am sorry to say this doesn't work for me. I do get the button but hibernation does not work at all.
I have been running LMDE2 for more than one year and then decided to move to Mint 19 to get newer software. LMDE2 with kernel 3.16 had some glitches but in the last 6 months hibernation worked like a charm. I tend to believe the problem is in kernel 4.15, because all I get is freezing the machine in a coma state, when I have to push the power button to kill it. When rebooting, the system has a fresh start. Remembering what the disk activity was like in LMDE2 and checking what it is like now, I would say the hibernation process never writes a single byte to the swap partition. Of course I put the UUID of the swap partition (checked also by GParted) into the grub file. I would appreciate suggestions, here below is the output of /var/log/pm-suspend.log. Thanks in advance

EDIT I installed stable kernel 4.9.124 and hibernation works flawlessly again. Although I really don't feel expert enough to point fingers, it looks that in this respect there's a regression in the kernel between 4.9 and 4.15, which might affect only some machines.

Many thanks for this excellent HowTo which worked fine for me on Mint 19.

One issue I hit was that when restarting from a hibernation, the GRUB screen had a 30 second timeout rather than the 3 seconds I had set.

After a little investigation I found that inserting the following line into /etc/default/grub fixed this :-GRUB_RECOVERYFAIL_TIMEOUTGRUB_RECORDFAIL_TIMEOUT=$GRUB_TIMEOUT

This might be down to my environment which is an Asus EeePC Netbook used as a Media Server. The internal HDD layout is as supplied with Windows XP with a standard Windows MBR. Mint 19 is installed on a USB HDD with GRUB2 on its MBR. So booting Mint19 involves pressing ESC a couple of times to get the USB HDD in the Boot Device List.

This set up was simply to prove that Mint 19 64 bit Cinnamon with Wine could run an old version of iTunes just as well as Windows XP can. Which it does (although 1GB RAM is a bit tight).

Last edited by xGuy on Mon Nov 12, 2018 12:26 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Many thanks for pointing out that serious error! It could potentially have caused a lot of wasted time for someone.

I will try to be more accurate in future. Normally I would copy paste from the actual file but in this case I couldn't do that - not even if logged in remotely via VNC. I guess I could have pulled the file over with SSH.

Apologies to anyone misled but hopefully your timely intervention will have forestalled that possibility.

this is probably because i have an encrypted file system with lvm. other than that, excellent howto, thank you! i don't like to reboot that often because i like to keep applications open. also, hibernation keeps encryption intact, good thing.